FREMONT, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — September 16, 2009 —
SGI®
(NASDAQ:
SGI) today announced that the
SGI®
Altix® 4700 platform, powered by Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® Processor
9040 (1.6GHz), outperformed top competitors including HP, IBM and Sun in
all relevant Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC)
benchmarks for performance and scalability. The SGI world records were
recently achieved at the
Leibniz
Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany, and prove SGI to
be the leading single-system image (SSI) platform in the world,
surpassing competitor performance by more than five times in some cases.

“SGI Altix outperformed HP, IBM and Sun,” said Mark J. Barrenechea,
president and CEO of SGI. “Our customers require the fastest compute and
storage systems possible. For floating point arithmetic, we were five
times faster than IBM, and for Java, we were four times faster than Sun.
SGI is pleased with setting these world records in very relevant
technology areas.”

SGI is more than five times faster than its next closest SSI
competitor in the SPECfp_rate_base2006 floating point performance
benchmark. Altix 4700 proved 5.7 times faster than the Sun SPARC
Enterprise 9000, its next closest SSI competitor; IBM and HP products
trailed further behind.

SGI performed over four times better in the SPECint_rate_base2006
integer performance benchmark. Altix 4700 proved 4.3 times faster
than the Sun product, its next closest SSI competitor.

SGI outperforms IBM by almost three times in Java performance with
SPECjbb2005 benchmark. Altix 4700 is the leader in Java
performance as measured by SPECjbb2005, outperforming IBM by 2.8 times.

SGI has five times higher aggregate memory bandwidth than its next
closest competitors. Altix 4700 has the highest aggregate memory
bandwidth in the world, five times higher than its next closest
competitors, NEC and IBM.

“The results of these SPEC benchmarks are impressive, and SGI Altix has
proven to be a powerhouse among scale-up architectures for some of the
most complex real-world HPC applications in the world,” said Steve
Conway, IDC’s research vice president of HPC. “For example, one Fortune
500 company we recently visited reserves Altix for the firm's toughest
jobs while assigning other work to standard clusters. These SPEC
benchmarks are an absolute home run and solidify Altix’s position as a
leading platform in its space.”

SGI
Altix is a large, shared-memory SSI architecture that powers some of
the most important systems in the world, facilitating research in such
fields as global warming, fraud detection and homeland security. The SGI
benchmarking experts used an SSI node with 1024 Itanium cores and 4TB of
memory with Novell’s SuSE Linux® Enterprise 10 operating environment to
achieve these results in three SPEC benchmarks: SPECjbb2005,
SPECint_rate_base2006 and SPECfp_rate_base2006.

Complete SPECjbb2005, SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 results are
available at:

SGI® is a global leader in large-scale clustered
computing, high-performance storage, HPC, data center enablement and
services. SGI is focused on helping customers solve their most demanding
business and technology challenges. Visit
www.sgi.com
for more information.